send_file has been around since Rails 1.0.0 I'm sure it has. But so have components, and FastCGI, and webrick, and old-school Test::Unit [1], and fixtures, and

send_file has been around since Rails 1.0.0 I'm sure it has. But so have components, and FastCGI, and webrick, and old-school Test::Unit [1], and fixtures, and the art of constructing CRUD routes one at a time by hand instead of using map.resources and RESTful routing. And a lot of other things which are extinct, deprecated, considered harmful, frowned upon, or generally ignored in favor of newer alternatives. A blog post doesn't have to contain something new to be informative. Sometimes the fact that it doesn't contain anything new is informative: It suggests that the old solution is still considered the canonical solution. [2] Thanks for the Guides recommendation, by the way. A very useful resource, indeed. -- [1] That is: Test::Unit without Shoulda and/or Rspec enhancement, which seem to be all the rage these days. [2] Of course, you have to be confident that the blogger you're reading has actually been paying attention.